The Hades Factor Read online

  “If I can contact him, I’ll give him your message, Colonel.” Forbes stood up. “A tip. Be careful who you talk to, and watch your back, whatever you plan to do. There’s an arrest order out for you—AWOL and a fugitive. Don’t try to contact me again.”

  Smith’s chest contracted as he listened to the news. He was not surprised, but the confirmation was still a blow. He felt betrayed and violated, but that was the pattern since he had returned from London. First he had lost Sophia, and now he was losing his profession, his career. It stuck in his throat like broken glass.

  As the FBI man walked to the door, Smith glanced around the café with its scattering of patrons bent over their exotic coffees and teas. He looked up just in time to see Forbes push through the doorway and scan the bustling street with a long-accustomed eye. Then he was gone, vanishing like the steam from his coffee. Smith put money on the table and slipped out the back door. He saw no one suspicious outside and no dark sedans parked with people in them. His pulse beating a wary tattoo, he walked away briskly toward the distant Woodley Metro station.

  Chapter Sixteen

  10:03 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  At Dupont Circle, Smith left the Metro. The morning sun radiated down bright and warm on the thick traffic as it circled the park. He glanced casually around and began to walk, joining the throngs of business and government people taking early coffee breaks. His gaze constantly moved as he headed off through the maze of streets that hosted cafés, cocktail lounges, bookstores, and boutiques. The shops here were more upscale than in Adams-Morgan, and even though it was October, tourists were pulling out their billfolds to make purchases.

  Several times as he examined faces, he had bittersweet feelings of déjà vu, and for a few exciting moments it seemed as if he had just caught sight of Sophia …

  She was not dead.

  She was alive and vital. Just a few steps away.

  There was one brunette who had the same swinging, sexy gait. He had to fight himself from rushing past so he could turn and stare. Another woman had her long blond hair pulled back in the same kind of loose ponytail that Sophia always wore to keep her hair from her face when she worked. Then there was the woman who breezed past leaving a scent so much like Sophia’s that his stomach knotted with anguish.

  He had to get over this, he told himself sternly.

  He had work to do. Crucial work that would give some meaning to Sophia’s tragic death.

  He inhaled and kept at it. He made himself watch all around for tails. He walked north up Massachusetts Avenue toward Sheridan Circle and Embassy Row. Halfway to Sheridan, he made one last move to assure himself that he had left behind any surveillance: He stepped quickly into the main entrance of the just-opened Phillips Collection, hurried through empty rooms of remarkable Renoirs and Cézannes, provocative Rothkos and O’Keeffes, and slipped out a side fire door. He paused, leaned back against the building, and studied pedestrians and cars.

  At last he was satisfied. No one was watching him. If there had been a tail, he had lost him or her. So he hurried back to Massachusetts Avenue and his Triumph parked on a side street.

  After hearing the telecast last night about Kielburger, Melanie Curtis, and the AWOL charge against him, he had intensified these evasive maneuvers. Before dawn he had awakened in Gaithersburg on the inner alarm of all combat surgeons in the field. He had been drenched in a cold, sad sweat following a night of dreaming about Sophia. He forced himself to eat a solid breakfast, and he studied the morning traffic as it increased on the highway and the traffic helicopters that monitored it. Showered, shaved, and determined, he was on the road by seven.

  He had called Special Agent Forbes from a pay phone and driven across the Potomac into Washington. He had cruised around for a time before parking the Triumph off Embassy Row and hopping on the Metro to meet Forbes.

  After retrieving the Triumph, he drove sedately to a busy residential street between Dupont and Washington Circles where a prominent sign marked the entrance to a narrow driveway bordered by a high, unruly hedge: PRIVATE PROPERTY—KEEP OUT! Beneath it hung smaller signs: NO TRESPASSING. NO SALESMEN. NO SOLICITING. NO COLLECTORS. GO AWAY!

  Smith ignored the signs and pulled into the driveway. There was a small white clapboard bungalow with black trim hidden behind the hedge. He parked in front of a brick walk that led from the drive to the front door.

  As soon as he stepped out, a mechanical voice announced: “Halt! State your name and purpose of visit. Failure to do so within five seconds will result in defensive measures.” The deep voice appeared to emanate from the sky with the authority of the heavens.

  Smith grinned. The bungalow owner was an electronic genius, and the driveway surface was booby-trapped with a catalog of nasty discomforts, from a cloud of eye-stinging gas to a mercaptan spray that bathed victims in a foul stench. The owner—Smith’s old friend Marty Zellerbach—had been hauled into court a few times many years ago by irate salesmen, meter readers, postal officials, and delivery people.

  But Marty had two Ph.D.s, and he always appeared mild and responsible, if a little naive. That he was also extremely wealthy and bought the best defense attorneys did not hurt. Their arguments were passionate and convincing: His victims could not have missed his signs. They had to know they were trespassing. They had been asked to perform a perfectly reasonable act of identification by a disabled man who lived alone. And they had been warned.

  His security, while annoying, was neither lethal nor seriously injurious. He had always won his cases, and after a few times the police gave up charging him and advised complainants to settle for compensation and quit trespassing.

  “Come on, Marty,” Smith said, amused, “it’s your old pal, Jonathan Smith.”

  There was a surprised hesitation. Then: “Approach the front door using the brick path. Do not step off the path. That would activate further defensive measures.” The stilted voice disappeared, and suddenly the words were concerned. “Careful, Jon. I wouldn’t want you to end up stinking like a skunk.”

  Smith took the route Marty described. Invisible laser beams swept the entire property. A footstep off the path, or intrusion from anywhere else, would activate God-knew-what.

  He climbed to the covered porch. “Call off the watchdogs, Marty. I’ve arrived. Open the door.”

  From somewhere inside, the voice coaxed, “You have to follow the rules, Jon.” Instantly the disembodied voice returned: “Stand in front of the door. Open the box to the right and place your left hand on the glass.”

  “Oh, please.” But Smith smiled.

  A pair of ominous metal covers over the door slid up to reveal dark tubes that could contain anything from paint guns to rocket launchers. Marty had always found childlike glee in ideas and games most people left behind at adolescence. But Smith gamely stood in front of the door, opened the metal box, and rested his hand on the glass plate. He knew the routine: A video camera snapped a digital photo of his face, and instantly Marty’s supercomputer would convert the facial measurements into a series of numerical values. At the same time, the glass plate recorded Smith’s palm print. Then the computer compared the collected data to the bar codes it kept on file for everyone Marty knew.

  The wooden voice announced: “You are Lt. Col. Jonathan Jackson Smith. Therefore, you may enter.”

  “Thanks, Marty,” he said dryly. “I’ve been wondering who in the hell I was.”

  “Very funny, Jon.”

  A series of dramatic clicks, clanks, and thuds followed, and the woodcovered steel door swung open on a creaky track. Maintenance was not one of Marty’s top priorities, but theatricality was. Smith stepped inside what was a traditional foyer except for one imposing detail—his progress was stopped by a walk-in metal cage. As the front door automatically closed behind, Smith waited, trapped by jail-like bars.

  “Hi, Jon.” Marty’s high, slow, precise voice welcomed him from beyond the foyer. As the cage’s gate clicked open, Marty appeared in a doorway to
the side. “Come in, please.” His eyes twinkled with devilment.

  He was a small, rotund man who walked awkwardly, as if he had never really learned how to move his legs. Smith followed him into an enormous computer room in a state of utter disorder and neglect. A formidable Cray mainframe and other computer equipment of every possible description filled all wall space and most of the floor, and what furniture there was looked like Salvation Army discards. Steel cages enclosed the draped windows.

  As Marty’s right hand flopped aimlessly, he held out his left for Smith to shake, while his brilliant green eyes looked away at the left wall of computer equipment.

  Smith said, “It’s been a while, Marty. It’s good to see you.”

  “Thanks. Me, too.” He smiled shyly, and his green eyes made glittering contact and then skittered away again.

  “Are you on your medication, Marty?”

  “Oh, yes.” He did not sound happy about that. “Sit down, Jon. You want some coffee and a cookie?”

  Martin Joseph Zellerbach—Ph.D. D. Litt. (Cantab)—had been a patient of Smith’s Uncle Ted, a clinical psychiatrist, since Smith and Marty were in grammar school together. Far better adjusted and socially mature, Smith had taken Marty under his wing, protecting him from the cruel teasing of other children and even some teachers. Marty was not stupid. In fact, he had tested at the genius level since the age of five, and Smith had always found him funny, nice, and intellectually stimulating. With the years, Marty had grown even more intelligent—and more isolated. In school, he ran academic circles around everyone, but he had no concept of—or interest in—other people and the relationships so important to preteens and teens.

  He obsessed on one arcane curiosity after another and lectured at great length. He knew all the answers in many of his courses, so to relieve his boredom he would disrupt his classes with his wild and dazzling fantasies and manias. No one could believe anyone as smart as Marty was not being intentionally rude and a troublemaker, so teachers frequently sent him to the principal’s office. In later years, Smith had to fight a number of enraged boys who thought Marty was “dissing” them or their girlfriends.

  All of this unusual behavior was the result of Asperger’s syndrome, a rare disorder at the less severe end of the autism spectrum. Diagnosed in childhood with everything from “a dash of autism” to obsessive-compulsive disorder and high-functioning autism, Marty was finally diagnosed accurately by Smith’s Uncle Ted. Marty’s key symptoms were consuming obsessions, high intelligence, crippling lack of social and communications skills, and outstanding talent in a specific area—electronics.

  On the milder end, Asperger sufferers were often described as “active but odd” or “autistic-eccentric.” But Marty had a slightly more severe case, and despite specialists’ attempts to socialize him, except for the few brief trips to court years ago, he had not left this bungalow—which he had carefully and lovingly created as part electronic paradise and part haven for his eccentricities—in fifteen years.

  There was no cure, and the only help for people like Marty was medication, usually central nervous system stimulants like Adderall, Ritalin, Cylert, or the new one Marty took—Mideral. As with schizophrenia, the medicines allowed Marty to function with both feet firmly planted on the earth. They restrained his fantasies, enthusiasms, and obsessions. Although he hated them, he took them when he knew he had to do “normal” activities such as pay bills or when his Asperger’s was threatening to spin him completely out of control.

  But when medicated, Marty said everything was dull and flat and distant, and much of his genius and creativity was lost. So he had eagerly embraced the new medicine that acted fast to calm him, as most did, but whose effects lasted only six hours at most, which meant a dose could be taken more frequently. Living sealed off from the world in his bungalow, he could be off his meds more than most Asperger’s sufferers could.

  If you needed a computer genius to do creative, maybe illegal, hacking, you wanted Marty Zellerbach off his meds. It was then up to you to keep him on track and to know when it was time to bring him back to earth if he threatened to fly off into an orbit of his own.

  Which was why Smith was here.

  “Marty, I need help.”

  “Of course, Jon.” Marty smiled, a stained coffee mug in his hand. “It’s almost time for a new dose of meds. I’ll stay off.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” Smith explained about the report from the Prince Leopold Institute in Belgium that did not appear to exist. About the outside phone calls Sophia could have made or received, yet the records were gone. About his need for any information relating to the unknown virus anywhere in the world. “A couple of other things, too. I want to find Bill Griffin. You remember him from school.” And finally he described his tracking the three virus victims to the Gulf War and the MASH unit. “See if you can find anything about the virus in Iraq as far back as ten years ago.”

  Marty put down his mug and made a beeline for his mainframe. He flashed an enthusiastic smile. “I’ll use my new programs.”

  Smith stood. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  “All right.” Marty rubbed his hands together. “This is going to be fun.”

  Smith left him working his sluggish, awkward fingers on the keyboard. The meds would wear off soon, and then, Smith knew, the fingers and the brain would fly until they came close to spiraling off the earth entirely, and Marty would have to take his Mideral again.

  Outside, Smith walked quickly to his Triumph. As traffic drove noisily past, he did not notice a helicopter pause high overhead and then speed on, making a long loop to the left to parallel him as he drove toward Massachusetts Avenue.

  The noise of the rotors and wind through the open window of the Bell JetRanger vibrated the chopper. Nadal al-Hassan cupped a microphone close to his mouth. “Maddux? Smith has visited a bungalow near Dupont Circle.” He located the bungalow on a city map and described the hidden driveway and high hedge. “Find out who lives there and what Smith wanted.”

  He clicked off his microphone and stared down at the old, classic Triumph below as it headed toward Georgetown. For the first time, al-Hassan felt uneasy. It was not a feeling he would communicate to Tremont, but as a result he would stay close to this Smith. Bill Griffin, even if he were to be trusted, might not be enough to end the threat.

  Chapter Seventeen

  10:34 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  Bill Griffin had been briefly married, and Smith had met the woman twice back before the couple was even engaged. Both times they had been happily out on the town, hitting the noisy New York bars Bill frequented in his army days. Bill did a lot of loud bars then, perhaps because his life was spent in remote foreign locations where every step could be his last and every sound was an enemy. Smith knew almost nothing about the woman or the marriage, except that it had lasted less than two years. He had heard she still lived in the same Georgetown apartment she had shared with Bill. If Bill was in danger, he might have holed up there, where few people would know to look.

  It was a long shot, but aside from Marty, he had few options.

  When he reached her apartment house, he used his cell phone to call her.

  She answered promptly and efficiently. “Marjorie Griffin.”

  “Ms. Griffin, you won’t remember me, but this is Jonathan Smith, Bill’s—”

  “I remember you, Captain Smith. Or is it major or colonel by now?”

  “I’m not sure what it is, and it doesn’t matter anyway, but it was lieutenant colonel yesterday. I see you kept Bill’s name.”

  “I loved Bill, Colonel Smith. Unfortunately for me, he loved his work more. But you didn’t call to inquire about my marriage or divorce. You’re looking for Bill, right?”

  He was wary. “Well—”

  “It’s all right. He said you might call.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  There was a pause. “Where are you?”

  “In front of your building.
The Triumph.”

  “I’ll come down.”

  In the large, chaotic room crammed with computer terminals, monitors, and circuit boards, Marty Zellerbach leaned forward, concentrating. Torn printouts were stacked in messy piles near his chair. A radio receiver emitted low static as it eavesdropped on the squeals and beeps of data transmissions. The drapes were closed, and the air was cool and dry, almost claustrophobic, which was good for Marty’s equipment and the way he liked it. He was smiling. He had used Jon Smith’s codes to connect with the USAMRIID computer system and enter the server. Now the real action began. He felt a deep thrill as he scrolled through the various directories until he found the system administrator’s password file. He gave a little laugh of derision. The data was scrambled.

  He exited and found the file that revealed that the USAMRIID server used Popcorn—one of the latest encryptors. He nodded, pleased. It was first-rate software, which meant the lab was in good hands.

  Except that they had not counted on Marty Zellerbach. Using a program he had invented, he configured his computer to search for the password by scrambling every word from Webster’s Unabridged plus the dialogue of all four Star Wars movies, the Star Trek television series and feature movies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and every J. R. R. Tolkien novel—all favorites of cybertechs.

  Marty jumped up and paced. He grabbed his hands behind his back, and in his weaving gait he moved around the room as if it were a ship on the high seas and he its pirate captain. His program was incredibly fast. Still, like other mortals, he had to wait. Today the best hackers and crackers could steal most passwords, penetrate even the Pentagon’s computers, and ride like Old West outlaws through the worldwide Internet. Even a novice could buy software that enabled him to invade and attack Web sites. For that reason, major corporations and government agencies continually heightened their security. As a result, Marty now wrote his own programs and developed his own scanners to find system weaknesses and to break through the firewalls that would stop others.